Thursday, July 9, 2026, 12:30-14:00 CEST
Online
Organizer/Chair:
Marianna Fotaki, Warwick University Business School, UK
Panelists:
Emilio Dabed, Arab American University in Palestine, Palestine
Shir Hever, Economist and Political Scientist
Iain Munro, Newcastle Business School, UK
Lila Skountridaki, University of Edinburgh, UK
Crimes against humanitydefined in Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC - 1998) as specified acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against civilians (including murder, enslavement, torture, persecution, deportation, and other inhumane acts)are rarely insulated from markets. Contemporary political economies of violence depend upon infrastructure, logistics, data systems, extractive industries, financial flows, and technological innovation. Corporate actors (broadly defined) may therefore be enablers, beneficiaries, legitimators, or even instigators of atrocities. Yet how and why corporate actors enable or gain from these atrocitiesand which theories best explain this involvementremain underexplored. The immense violence we are witnessing today stands against a paucity of research on corporate involvement in crimes against humanity.
There is a long history of corporate complicity in crimes against humanity, with numerous examples of direct involvement (see
Bakan, 2004; Hernández & Araos, 2024). However, there has been far too little consideration given to ongoing crimes against
humanity, where market actors (i.e., multinational enterprises, industry groups, or entrepreneurs) and non-market players
(i.e., media, governments, or non-governmental organizations) engage in their facilitation, profiteering, or silencing (Abdelnour,
2023; Wettstein, 2010). Much organization and management research approaches such topics through acontextual framings (e.g.,
“extreme contexts,” “grand challenges”) and theorises violence through conventional, depoliticised analyses (Abdelnour & Abu
Moghli, 2021).
Yet, corporations operate in contexts marked by prolonged occupation, civil war, apartheid governance, ethnic persecution,
and mass displacement–where corporate revenue depends on systems of dispossession, surveillance, militarisation, or extractivism
(Georgi, 2025; Jaser, 2026). The situation across historic Palestine–especially Gaza–is in part the outcome of near total
impunity for decades of dispossession and military occupation, over a century of imperial domination, culminating in two years
of live-streamed genocide that directly killed more than 75,000 people in the first 15-months alone (Spagat et al., 2026),
83% of them civilians, and more than half of them children (Khatib et al., 2024; Mansour, 2026), while related deaths due
to the blockade of food and medicines or fallout from the decimation of the healthcare system are in the hundreds of thousands.
Impunity is not merely political; it is also economic. The economic subjugation of Palestinians has long been integral to
Israel's military occupation and apartheid (Roy, 1995). More recently, the role of tech start-ups, Big Tech, shipping and
logistics, weapons industries, universities, and even governmental/non-governmental organizations in facilitating and profiting
from occupation, apartheid, and genocide has come into focus (Arda & Banerjee, 2021; Loewenstein, 2024).
The 2025 report of the UN Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Albanese, 2025) identifies corporate actors
across technology, construction, finance, insurance, energy, and weapons sectors, as well as academia, all of which support
the economic systems underpinning occupation and military violence. For instance, technology firms supply facial recognition
systems, data warehousing, and data analytics platforms to state agencies and weapons companies for the development and deployment
of AI-informed autonomous weapons systems and for running mass detention and persecution facilities (Albanese, 2025). The
UN Special Rapporteur names universities alongside corporate actors as complicit in enabling crimes against humanity through
financial investments, research partnerships, historical legacies (Perugini & Vadasaria, 2025; Vadasaria & Abdelnour, 2025),
and ongoing relations with Israeli academia despite their deep integration with systems of apartheid, military occupation,
and war (Wind, 2024).
This proposal is urgent, not only because of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, but because it draws acute attention to the
pervasiveness of corporate complicity in crimes against humanity, where large-scale violence intersects with global supply
chains and capital flows (Georgi, 2025). While legal scholarship focuses on knowledge, intent, or the technicalities of aiding
and abetting (Bassiouni, 2011; Clapham & Jerbi, 2001), our scholarship can contribute to conceptualising corporate agency,
behaviour, benefit, silence, structural participation, or resistance in situations of extreme harm. It is not an edge case
for organizational studies: it is a stress test of corporate moral agency in a global economy where business decisions can,
under foreseeable conditions, initiate and enact widespread systematic violence.
The sub-plenary will consist of two parts – a panel talk (part 1) and breakout discussions on specific topics (part 2). The
first part (60 minutes) will feature a short introduction to the overall topic and the aim of the sub-plenary, followed by
short input talks (approx. 15 minutes each) by the four panellists. The second part (30 minutes) will include a moderated
Q&A session (led by the organizer).
References – will be added soon
Biographies
Marianna Fotaki s professor of business ethics at the University of Warwick Business School, UK. She has published over 100 articles in leading
international journals and several books on gender, inequalities, the marketisation of public services, and whistleblowing.
Her current research focuses on the caring economy, the impact of digitalisation on the future of care, and responses to forced
migrant arrivals in Europe. She is a member of EGOS and an organizer of sub-themes and sub-plenaries since 2009.
Emilio Dabed is a Palestinian-Chilean lawyer and Ph.D. in political science (Science Po-Aix en Provence, France) specialising in constitutional
matters, international law, and human rights. Currently, he is Adjunct Professor of international law at the Arab American
University in Palestine. His latest research and publications look at the relations between law and political and social changes,
subjectivity, and identity formation, with a particular focus on the disciplinary powers of law and the discourse of (human)
rights in contemporary politics.
Shir Hever is an economist and political scientist who specialises in the analysis of Israel’s military industry, arms trade and surveillance
technology. He was born and grew up in Jerusalem and now lives in Germany and was until recently the coordinator of the military
campaign of BDS. He is an author of The Privatization of Israeli Security (Pluto Press, 2017) and his recent article is on the Israeli economy entitled ‘Shutdown Nation: the political economy of self-destruction’
published in the Review of Radical Political Economics, in 2025.
Iain Munro is Professor of Organization and Leadership at the University of Newcastle Business School, UK. His interests are in political
economy and philosophy, with a focus on transnational corporate power, neocolonialism, and investigative journalism. He is
a co-author (with Kate Kenny and Marianna Fotaki) of New Perspectives on Whistleblowing (BUP, 2025). Iain is a long-time EGOS member.
Lila Skountridaki is a Senior Lecturer in Organization Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her research, which focuses on the organization
of work, has engaged with theories such as the political economy of care, moral economy, professional ethics, employee voice
and has been published in journals such as Sociology, Business & Society, Work, Employment and Society, the Industrial Relations Journal and the Sociology of Health
and Illness. Lila has been an EGOS member for many years.